RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksBounded in time by a single weekend, held in tension by Taylor’s spare, restrained syntax, and given no more than a handful of central characters who continue to find new ways to hurt each other, Real Life by rights should read like a closed-in, misanthropic comedy in five acts. It never shades into that closed-in misanthropy, managing instead to maintain an astounding naturalistic sensibility: we are less comfortably watching these characters in a glassed-in trap of the author’s own making than we are drawn into their inner lives, even when those lives are racist, selfish, or violent. The novel shares DNA with Mrs. Dalloway in this way: Taylor’s parsimony with time, facility with simile, and precise measure of the human heart are a match for Woolf’s ... Real Life’s extensive, careful use of simile holds the past and the future in tremulous tension.
